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There's nothing magical about property that means it should be taxed at such low rates. If it weren't for the magical hold that the 1978 ballot initiative Prop 13 has on Californians of a certain vintage, there would be consensus -- liberals and conservatives -- about this. As Milton Friedman once told me in an interview on the subject, property doesn't work like income and sales. You don't get less of it when you tax it more. If God could normalize our property tax system, California's home prices would fall to levels that would permit more members of the next generation of Californians to afford to buy them. And income and sales taxes would drop as well.

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